Hi. I've looked at this site about 10 times in the past couple of years. Sometimes I'm trying to figure out whether I have social phobia, and sometimes I wonder if it would be a good place to ask a question about where to go to meet people to other people who have difficulty with that.
After a few minutes of looking at the posts, I usually decide I don't really fit in here. It seems like everyone else here has a lot more social life, or they're teenagers in school. I start thinking things like, How can people here say they have social phobia or social anxiety and at the same time mention having friends or going to work or going to school? Why do they take seriously the idea that they have a disorder and need a diagnosis and might even have something abnormal about their brains so that it might even make sense to take drugs or some other extreme, health-risking treatment, when they are in fact living just like other people, going to school or work, having friends, going out and meeting people, and so on, they're just a little uncomfortable about it and think they could do better?
I know there are degrees of social phobia from shyness to severe anxiety symptoms, and having a social life doesn't mean that a person can't experience those symptoms. I guess that's something different from my experience, because I just see my girlfriend every day and haven't met anyone else for years, and I'm not really anxious about it or scared or anything like that. I'm just curious what I would do to meet anyone or what I'm supposed to do, because media like t.v. and the Internet here make it seem like it's normal, maybe expected, to have more social life than that.
